The term was popularized by the American linguistJohn Samuel Kenyon, who, in 1930, considered it equivalent to the speech of "the North," or "Northern American,"[7] but, in 1934, "Western and Midwestern";[8] however, the term was disseminated earlier, for example, by the American Anglicist George Philip Krapp, who in 1925 considered it "Western" and wide-ranging.[9] Modern studies, in fact, link it to northern patterns of the non-coastal Eastern United States,[10] tracing its regional origins to interior Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and the adjacent Midwestern regions[6] prior to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift,[11] though today it is widespread throughout much of the country. By 1982, according to British phonetician John C. Wells, two-thirds of the American population spoke with a General American accent.[3] General American is sometimes, controversially,[12] referred to as a de factostandard accent of the United States.[3]

General American, like British Received Pronunciation (RP) and most prestige accent varieties of many other societies, has never been the accent of the entire nation.

The General American accent is most closely related to a generalized Midwestern accent and is spoken particularly by many newscasters. This has led the accent to sometimes be referred to as a "newscaster accent" or "television English". It is thought to have evolved from the English spoken by colonials in the Mid-Atlantic states, evolved and moved west. General American is sometimes promoted as preferable to other regional accents.[13][14] In the United States, classes promising "accent reduction","accent modification" and "accent neutralization" generally attempt to teach speech patterns similar to this accent. The well-known television journalistLinda Ellerbee, who worked hard early in her career to eliminate a Texas accent, stated, "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere";[15] political comedian Stephen Colbert worked hard as a child to reduce his South Carolina accent because of the common portrayal of Southerners as stupid on American television.[13][14]

It is commonly believed that General American English evolved as a result of an aggregation of rural and suburban Midwestern dialects, though the English of the Upper Midwest can deviate quite dramatically from the sounds of General American, especially since that region's twentieth-century Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS). The local accent often gets more distinct the farther north one goes within the Midwest, with the Northern Midwest featuring its own dialect North Central American English. General American is also highly divergent from the accents typical of larger Midwestern cities and the Great Lakes region in general, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, where speech has undergone the NCVS. The fact that a rural Midwestern dialect became the basis of what is General American English is often attributed to the mass migration of Midwestern farmers to California and the Pacific Northwest from where it spread. However, General American has origins dating back even before conservative Midwestern speech, itself stemming from interior Pennsylvania and upstate New York.[6]

The area of the United States where the local accent is most similar to General American

According to Matthew J. Gordon, a sociolinguistics and American dialectology researcher:

The fact that the NCS is well established in Michigan is particularly interesting in light of the dominant beliefs about local speech. As research by Dennis Preston has shown, Michiganders believe they are "blessed" with a high degree of linguistic security; when surveyed, they rate their own speech as more correct and more pleasant than that of even their fellow Mid-westerners. By contrast Hoosiers tend to rate the speech of their state on par with that of Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find Michiganders who will claim that the speech of national broadcasters is modeled on their dialect. Even a cursory comparison of the speech of the network news anchors with that of the local news anchors in Detroit will reveal the fallacy of such claims.

Nevertheless, the Michiganders' faith that they speak an accentless variety is just an extreme version of the general stereotype of Midwestern English.[17]

Wine–whine merger: largely in effect toward [w] (listen); the phoneme [ʍ] (listen) is retained only in American English varieties that have not undergone the merger, with /ʍ/ often analyzed as a consonant cluster of /hw/.

/r/ as [ɹ] or [ɻ]: many Americans realize the phoneme [ɹ] (listen) (often transcribed as /r/) as postalveolar, with some possible retroflexion (perhaps, even as [ɻ] (listen)).[19]

T-glottalization and intervocalic alveolar flapping: /t/ undergoes t-glottalization, producing a glottal stop[ʔ], before a syllabic nasal or in word-final position, for example, in words like button[ˈbʌʔn] (listen) and sit[sɪʔ] (pronunciation of "sit-down money"). The word-final /t/ rule, however, may be superseded by General American's intervocalic alveolar flapping, wherein intervocalic/t/ as well as intervocalic /d/ become [ɾ] (listen) when between a stressed syllable and an unstressed one, or between two unstressed syllables; for example, leader[ˈɫiɾɚ] (listen), catalogue/catalog[ˈkʰæɾəɫɑg] (listen), or ratty[ˈɹæɾi] (listen). Typically, /t/ and /d/ also between /r/ and a vowel become realized as the flap consonant [ɾ]; thus: party[ˈpʰɑɹɾi] (listen).

L-velarization: the typical English distinction between a "clear L" (i.e. [l] (listen)) and a "dark L" (i.e. [ɫ] (listen) or even [ʟ] (listen)) is much less noticeable in General American compared to other English dialects; it may even be altogether absent.[20] Instead, General American speakers pronounce even the "clear" variant as more or less "dark", meaning that all "L" sounds have some degree of velarization.[21] Additionally, some speakers may vocalize/l/ to [ɤ̯] when it appears before /f v/ (and sometimes also /s z/).[22]

When followed by /r/, the phoneme /ɒ/ is pronounced entirely differently by General American speakers as [ɔ~o], for example, in the words orange, forest, and torrent. The only exceptions to this are the words tomorrow, sorry, sorrow, borrow and, for some speakers, morrow, which use the sound [ɑ].

General American has eleven or twelve pure vowel sounds (or monophthongs) that can be used in stressed syllables (for some, typically in diphthongized combinations) as well as two to three vowels that can be heard only in unstressed syllables. The monophthongs of General American are shown in the table below:

1) Nearly all American English speakers pronounce /æŋ/ somewhere between [æŋ] and [ɛ̃ŋ], though Western speakers specifically favor [ɛ̃ŋ].
2) The NYC, Philadelphia, and Baltimore dialects' rule of tensing /æ/ in certain closed-syllable environments also applies to words inflectionally derived from those closed-syllable /æ/ environments that now have an open-syllable /æ/. For example, in addition to pass being tense (according to the general rule), so are its open-syllable derivatives passing and passer-by, but not passive.

^3[ə] (listen) and [ɪ̈] (also transcribed as [ᵻ] or [ɨ̞](listen)) are indeterminate vowel sounds that occur only in unstressed syllables of certain types. [ə] is heard as the ⟨a⟩ at the beginning of about and at the end of China, as the ⟨o⟩ in omit, and as the ⟨u⟩ in syrup. [ɪ̈] is heard as the ⟨a⟩ in private or cottage, the ⟨e⟩ in evading or sorted, the ⟨i⟩ in sordid, the ⟨u⟩ in minute, or the ⟨y⟩ in mythologist. [ə] and [ɪ̈] frequently overlap and easily merge, this is known as the weak-vowel merger.

^5 In American English, /ɜr/ (General American [ɝ]) and /ər/ (General American [ɚ]) are often analyzed[clarification needed] as sequences of /ʌr/ and /ər/, respectively.[citation needed] In actual speech, General American speakers pronounce both, without much or any distinction, as [ɚ] (listen); for example, the word worker/ˈwɜrkər/ is often realized with two rhyming syllables as [ˈwɚkɚ] (listen).

^6 The General American vowel /u/ has a unique quality (listen); it tends to be slightly less rounded [u̜] and more fronted[u̟], and perhaps even diphthongized with a somewhat fronter and lower onset.

General American speakers are largely divided in how they pronounce the vowel sound in cot/ɑ/ and caught/ɔ/; some speakers pronounce the two with the same vowel sound but other speakers pronounce each word with distinct vowel sounds. Among speakers who distinguish between the two, the vowel of cot (usually transcribed in American English as [ɑ] (listen)), may be more of a central vowel which may vary from [a̠] to [ɑ̟] (listen), while /ɔ/ is phonetically lower, closer to [ɒ] (listen) with only slight rounding.[25] Among speakers who do not distinguish between the two and are thus said to have undergone the cot–caught merger, /ɑ/ usually remains a back vowel, [ɑ], sometimes showing lip rounding as [ɑʷ] or [ɒ], and, because these speakers do not distinguish between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, their retracted allophones for /ɑ/ may be identical to the lowered allophones of /ɔ/ among speakers who preserve the contrast.

Depending on one's analysis, people who merge the vowels of cot and caught to /ɑ/ either have no phoneme /ɔ/ at all or have the [ɔ] only before /ɹ/. Words like north and horse are usually transcribed /nɔɹθ/ and /hɔɹs/, but because all accents with cot and caught merged to /kɑt/ have also undergone the horse–hoarse merger, it may be preferable to transcribe north and horse[no̞ɹθ] and [ho̞ɹs].[26] Thus, in these cases, the [ɔ] before /ɹ/ can be analyzed as an allophone of /o/.

The /aɪ/diphthong—[äɪ] (listen)—before a voiceless consonant may be raised towards [ɐɪ] or [ʌɪ], a growing phenomenon in General American, predominant historically in the northern, New England, and Mid-Atlantic regions.[28] In the General American accent, this alone causes a distinction, for example, between the words rider and writer (listen). Although present with most U.S. speakers, this phenomenon is considered one of the two variants of so-called "Canadian raising." This raising can also apply across word boundaries, though the position of a word or phrase's stress may deny the raising from taking place. For instance, a high school in the sense of "secondary school" is generally pronounced [ˈhɐɪsku̟ɫ]; however, a high school in the literal sense of "a tall school" is pronounced [ˌhäɪˈsku̟ɫ].

One phenomenon apparently unique to General American is the behavior of the stressed /ɒrV/ where /V/ stands for any vowel (usually /ə/ or /ɨ/)—i.e. stressed /ɒr/ followed by a vowel sound. Particularly words using this sound are pronounced distinctly in different North American accents: in New York–New Jersey English, the Philadelphia dialect, and the Carolinas they are all pronounced with /ɑr-/ and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with /ɔr-/ (thus an American's sorry sounds like sah-ree to a Canadian). But in General American there is a split: the majority of these words have /ɔr-/, like Canadian English, but the first five words of the list below have /-ɑr-/, like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers.[29] Words of this class include, among others:

General American stressed /ɒr/ followed by a vowel
in comparison with other English dialects:

Thomas, Erik R. (2001), An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English, Publication of the American Dialect Society 85, Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, ISSN0002-8207